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A RFA is a special purpose district established by voters in a service area that provides funding for fire and emergency medical services. A RFA can be made up of cities, fire districts or a combination of the two. Creation of a RFA is authorized by state law (Chapter 52.26, Revised Code of Washington.
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Currently, there are 13 RFA's in the state of Washington, including three in Snohomish County: the NCRFA, created in 2007—one of the first in the state; the South Snohomish County Regional Fire Authority, created in 2017; and the Marysville Fire District RFA created in 2019.
A RFA is created by development of a RFA Plan which is approved by a vote of the people in the proposed service area. The vote required is a simple majority, unless the financing proposal includes fire benefit charges or other 60% approval threshold. North County RFA was created in 2007 by combining Fire Districts 14 and 18. Voters in the two Districts approved the creation and funding of NCRFA at the August, 2006 election.
Cities or Fire Districts can join an existing RFA through a process called "annexation." Annexation requires revision of the RFA Plan describing how the additional agency (city or fire district) would be served by the RFA; then, both the RFA and the agency proposing to annex must agree to the revised plan. After that, voters in the agency proposing to annex must approve the annexation. A simple majority vote is required to approve the annexation. This is the process that will be used for the potential annexation of Arlington in to the NCRFA. If the City Council and NCRFA Governing Board reach agreement on a revised RFA Plan, the City Council and NCRFA Governing Board will then submit the annexation measure to the voters of Arlington. The annexation must then be approved by a majority of Arlington voters. The City of Stanwood and NCRFA agreed to an annexation process in 2017; Stanwood voters approved the annexation of the City into NCRFA by a vote of 83.4% in favor at the November 2018 general election.
Arlington's elected leaders and staff are exploring annexation with the leadership of the NCRFA for several reasons. First, it is anticipated that annexation would ensure better future funding stability for fire and emergency services in the City. Second, Annexation would enable additional efficiencies and service level improvements in delivery of fire and EMS services across both the NCRFA and the City. There are many ways in which the current partnership could be expanded if annexation occurred. Third, annexation would relieve some of the severe pressure on the City's General Fund which supports a broad range of important services now in addition to Fire & EMS, specifically, police, streets, courts and jail services, parks and administrative functions. Another reason that Arlington is considering annexation is to give City voters a choice about how to fund their fire and EMS services: through the current City General Fund and Ambulance Utility Fee, or through voter-approved RFA fire and EMS levies.
If Arlington voters approve annexation of the City into the NCRFA, fire and emergency medical services will be provided under the direction and management of the NCRFA. Personnel that currently serve in the Arlington Fire Department will continue to serve the City but under the employment of the RFA. Fire Stations and fire and EMS vehicles currently serving Arlington will continue in operation unless or until they become obsolete, and will continue to be labelled "City of Arlington Fire."
Under NCRFA's current policies, upon annexation into the NCRFA, Arlington residents with health insurance or Medicaid/Medicare will no longer be billed for their deductible portion of the ambulance transport costs, regardless of whether the insurance company pays the full amount billed or not.
Annexation will enable immediate service level improvements by bringing in-house 24-7 staffing of incident command (currently contracted out to other fire agencies in part); increase the number of vehicles to respond in incidents; increase flexibility in deployment of firefighters and paramedics; and, it is anticipated, slightly reduce response times in rural and suburban areas.
The two agencies jointly fund and share:
Firefighters routinely train together across the two agencies, using common training software; this prevents duplication of effort by training staff. Both agencies respond to calls in the other's territory almost daily, under mutual aid agreements. Both agencies are leaders in the Northwest Incident Support Program which provides chaplains at times of need, and food for crews on large scale incidents. Arlington and the NCRFA are also finalizing a program to share Part-Time Firefighters and emergency medical technicians (Expected implementation June 2020)
If the City and NCRFA reach agreement on an annexation plan this fall, the schedule calls for the plan to be placed before Arlington's voters at the February 2021 election. If approved by voters, the annexation would take effect January 1, 2022. The proposed annexation operating plan is being developed jointly by Arlington and NCRFA with input from labor leaders and the public.
The answer to this question depends on multiple factors, including the taxable value of your real property. Once the annexation becomes effective, the Arlington Ambulance Utility fee will be repealed and Arlington's EMS levy will be replaced by the NCRFA EMS levy. Real property in Arlington will become subject to the NCRFA fire levy.
Property owners in Arlington can anticipate paying more in property taxes overall (when combining the NCRFA and City property taxes) unless other City services are significantly cut. City leaders will be studying a full range of options over the next several months to determine what the City's general levy rate will be in the upcoming 2021-2022 budget if the annexation is approved. The City Council and Mayor will consider both the savings to the City from shifting fire and EMS responsibility to the NCRFA, as well as the needs of other critical City services. Future City Council's will need to determine future City levy rates for years after 2022.
The NCRFA is supported primarily by two property taxes: a fire levy and an EMS levy. Like the City Fire Department, the NCRFA also receives revenues from ambulance transports and other service fees and funds. The RFA's property tax levies are subject to the same state limits as City property taxes. Periodic voter approval is needed to restore the purchasing power of the RFA's property tax levies. In 2020, the NCRFA property tax levy rates are as follows:
Fire Levy: $1.50 per $1,000 of assessed value
EMS levy: $0.39 per $1,000 of assessed value
The NCRFA is governed by a Governing Board, currently with 6 members. The Board's powers are similar to those of a city council. The City and NCRFA are in discussion about how to add Arlington representation to the Governing Board of the NCRFA. This could take many forms, including one or more Board positions appointed by Arlington—permanently or temporarily, and/or by adding Board positions, either districted or at-large, which would be directly selected by voters.
The members of IAFF Local 3728, Arlington City Professional Firefighters, provide our earnest endorsement for asking the voters of Arlington to support a merger between Arlington City and the North County Regional Fire Authority.
All of our members are proud to work for the City of Arlington and appreciate the support that we have been shown by the city council. Joining the fire authority would allow for a more stable funding model and the ability to better serve the citizens of Arlington. Joining the two entities would allow for a more focused approach to fire and EMS services for both the city and the fire authority while eliminating redundancies.
Our members value the relationship that we have with our customers and assure you that we will continue that relationship. We look at the merger as an opportunity to share with others all the things that make working in Arlington a privilege. You can rest assured we will continue all of the community-oriented events that our city loves, as we take great pride in giving back to the citizens who support us.
We do not take this endorsement of a merger lightly. Our members have spent a significant amount of time weighing other options and see this merger as an opportunity to ensure adequate fire and EMS services to the community for the long-term. We ask that you vote yes to place the merger vote on the ballot
Funding for the City's Fire and Emergency Services Department will continue to compete for funding with other City departments as part of the City's budget process.


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We have received numerous questions in regards to fitteds. On this post and another post during the week we will be answering those questions and if you have any more you would like answered please feel free to ask!
What is the point of fitteds?
-Why use fitteds when there are pockets, and AIO's? A lot of moms like fitteds because they are nice and absorbent, you can find them in lots of great prints and they are breathable. They are kind of like the middle ground between prefolds and pockets/AIO's as far as price goes. Fitteds are easier to use than prefolds because they have a closure of some kind. So if you are wanting to go a cheaper way in CD'ing but want to avoid prefolds, fitteds are a good place to start.
Pros and Cons of fitteds:
- Pros of Fitted diapers
- Easier to use than prefolds
- Very absorbent
- Breathable
- Cheaper than AIO's and Pockets (as long as you buy the right brands)
- Super cute
- A good fitted and cover will hold up better than most pockets
- Made with high quality fabrics
- Fitteds are good for heavy wetters vs. pockets that need to be stuffed full for the same protection
- Good for keeping poo contained, especially EBF poo.
- Almost never have to worry about leaks
- Fit well
- You can tell if the baby is wet easier and change them sooner
- Great to use with out a cover, especially with newborns, because it allows the skin to get air to it.
- Easier to find made with natural fibers, and organic cottons, hemp and bamboo
- Dry quicker than AI1's and AI2's (depending on the brand)
- It is an OPTIONAL 2 part system. The cover does not have to be used.
- Cons of Fitted Diapers
- Not water proof and will leak
- Expensive considering you still have to buy a cover to go over them.
- In some cases a fitted will cost as much as or more than a pocket or AIO diaper.
- You have to use two pieces, but can reuse the cover.
- Baby can feel the wetness, not stay dry
- Bulky
- You have to touch the wet fitted to take it off.
- Fitteds tend to be the cutest diapers ever made but you have to cover them up and the covers are NEVER as cute!
- Using a PUL cover requires and extra step.
What to look for when buying fitteds:
- Price
- You will want to make sure the fitteds fit in your price range. If you are looking to use fitteds as a way to save money but still be able to avoid prefolds, pay attention to the price. Some fitted diapers can cost as much as or more than pocket diapers and AIO diapers.
- Materials
- A lot of people choose to use fitted diapers with covers because of the materials used to make them. You can avoid the micro fiber and other non natural materials by selecting fitteds. Most fitteds are made with cotton, hemp and bamboo and you can find them made with these materials in organic form.
- Prints
- One of the big things with fitted diapers is the cuteness factor. Lets face it...who doesn't love looking at adorable fluff? The variety of prints available on fitted diapers far extends the variety available in diapers made with PUL. What is the point of buying these adorable fitted diapers when you have to cover them up anyways with a cover? It's simple really. Fitteds are GREAT to use with out a cover. Keep in mind that if you are venturing away from home you will probably want to keep a cover on the baby so they don't leak through on to everything but while at home let the cute fitted go uncovered. This will allow the air to flow through and let the baby's bum air out, which is great if you are dealing with a bad rash.
- Absorbency
- Each brand of fitted diapers uses different materials and different amounts of it. Some are extremely big and bulky and others are nice and trim. However that doesn't mean that the bulky one will be more absorbent. It really depends on the material used to make it. Cotton, hemp and bamboo will soak up and hold a lot of liquid. Make sure you check out the materials that are used to make the fitted. If it contains microfiber it will absorb a good amount but the chances of it getting compression leaks is very high.
The Cost Factor with Fitteds:
I will give you a basic scenario of fitted diapers vs prefolds and pocket diapers. I will use what I started out with when I started cloth diapering my 1 month old (at the time). I purchased 3 covers and 12 prefolds. Here is the costs before taxes:
Prefolds and Covers
3 covers at $12.75 totaling $38.25.
2- 6 packs of prefolds at $15 a pack totaling $30
A total of $68.25 giving me a total of 12 diapers
Pocket Diapers
12 Pocket diapers at $17.95 each
A total of $215.40 giving me a total of 12 Diapers
Fitteds and Covers
3 Covers at $12.75 totaling $38.25
12 Fitteds (Thirsties Duo) at $17 a piece totaling $204
A total of $242.75 giving me a total of 12 diapers
3 Covers at $12.75 each totaling $38.25
12 Fitteds (Kissaluvs fitted) at $12.95 a piece totaling $155.40
A total of $193.65 giving me a total of 12 diapers
3 covers at $12.75 each totaling $38.25
12 Fitteds (Happy Heinys Sherpa) at $10.50 each totaling $126.00
A total of $164.25 giving me a total of 12 diapers
So as you can see looking at the different scenarios that fitteds do cost more than prefolds but if you can find a fitted that works well and is on the lower end of the price range they can be cheaper than getting pocket diaper and AIO diapers.
What makes the cost of the fitted very so much is the materials that it is made with as well as whether its a factory made or WAHM made item. Organic materials will cost you more money and WAHM fitteds will probably be a little higher in cost due to them being made one at a time by hand.
If you have any other questions about fitted diapers let us know in the comments section below or on our Facebook page. We would love to help you out!

subset: commoncrawl


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They are a fad that refuses to fade, but no solid evidence exists to show whether or not eating plans tailored to ABO blood types promote health, say Belgian researchers who tried their best to find some.
After sifting through the scientific literature, researchers identified just one indirectly related study - it looked at the effects of low-fat diets on cholesterol levels in people with different blood types - and even that one was weak, they concluded.
Some studies have found links between blood type and risk for developing blood clots or certain cancers, of having a heart attack and of hemorrhaging when infected with Dengue fever.
But no peer-reviewed research has indicated that eating foods supposedly compatible with one's blood type will improve health or induce weight loss more than a general diet plan.
Medical professionals already knew this, according to the study's senior author, Dr. Philippe Vandekerckhove at the Belgian Red Cross-Flanders in Mechelen.
"However, the general populace have access to blood type diets, regardless of medical guidance, and cannot be expected to be able to determine whether or not the health claims are, in fact, 'evidence-based'," Vandekerckhove said.
Blood type is determined by proteins on the surface of red blood cells and antibodies in the blood. The most familiar grouping, known as ABO blood types, refers to whether a person's cells carry the proteins known as A or B, or both of them, or neither of the two - which is designated blood type O.
The idea that blood type influences an individual's life - and even personality - is popular in parts of Asia. In 2011, for example, a Japanese politician apologized for a rude remark he had made about tsunami victims by blaming his blood type.
But blood type eating regimens are often premised on the theory that blood group signals a population's evolutionary background - primarily agrarian or hunter-gatherer, for instance - and that ancient history inclines people of certain blood types to thrive or suffer when eating one kind of diet or another.
Vandekerckhove's team, who published their results in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, searched the largest online databases of published research for clinical trials, reviews and all other types of studies for reports about people grouped by blood type following specifically prescribed diets.
Of 1,415 articles that initially turned up in the search, 16 looked promising at the start but 15 of those were discarded on closer analysis when the authors saw that they were poorly designed.
Only one was relevant to the topic and strong enough to be included in an analysis because it was a randomized controlled trial. But it had several other weaknesses, including the fact that participants knew which group they had been assigned to, the group sizes were small, and the main endpoint assessed was "bad cholesterol" levels, which doesn't directly address the question of health or weight.
Vandekerckhove and his coauthors were surprised and disappointed to find that no studies had been done that actually addressed the question, he said.
"Until a study has been performed which recruits people with a certain blood type who have adhered to the diet, compared with those of the same blood type who have not adhered to the diet, and the incidence of disease/measurement of health can be assessed, then the health effects of a blood type diet are not proven," he wrote in an email.
"Currently, there is no evidence to support that 'Blood Type Diets' have any effect on positively benefiting your health," said Beth Warren, a registered dietician in New York City who was not involved in the study.
"The fad diet was only made popular by a book during 1996…with no evidence to support it," Warren said.
"Eat Right 4 Your Type" by Peter D'Adamo has more than 7 million copies in print, and outlines a theory about which foods are best for people with the various ABO blood types to eat and which to avoid.
D'Adamo says he believes in the diet based on circumstantial evidence.
"All the authors did was conclude, as have I, that there is a lack of direct research on the subject," D'Adamo said by email.
He too would like to see direct research on the diets, but such studies are unlikely because they would be too costly. One-size-fits-all diets don't make sense either, D'Adamo said, and it may be that blood type is one way to predict which general weight loss diets work better for which people.
"We hope the results of this systematic review will reinforce the need for individuals and companies to take responsibility of their claims and clearly differentiate between something that is "evidence-based" rather than something that is "theoretical"," Vandekerckhove said.
"We have to be very careful when we hear of fad diets and look into if and how this way of eating benefits our health and goals for weight-loss and maintenance," Warren said.
"In this case, we cannot say that it does at this time," she said.
source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/05/31/no-science-behind-blood-type-diets-researchers-say/


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ThyssenKrupp chairman admits to mistakes but won't quit
ThyssenKrupp AG Chairman Gerhard Cromme admitted on Friday to making mistakes that contributed to massive losses at the German steelmaker, but didn't bow to pressure from some shareholders to step down.
"If you ask me whether we as a supervisory board could have done things better in the past, then my honest answer is 'yes, we trusted too long, we could have acted sooner'," he told the company's annual shareholders' meeting.
Cromme has come under fire for not stopping a botched multi-billion euro project in the Americas that caused Thyssen to post an annual loss of 4.7 billion euros ($6.3 billion) and pay no dividend for the 2011/12 fiscal year.
The euro zone debt crisis has meanwhile hurt demand for cars and weighed on steel prices, causing a slump in profits at Thyssen's European steel business. The company has 5.8 billion euros of net debt, almost 1.3 times its equity.
Cromme, also chairman of Siemens AG , continued to put most of the blame for the Americas disaster on former executives and said at the meeting that the supervisory board provided Thyssen with stability.
His comments were greeted by a mix of cheers and boos from a lively audience of several thousand, aware that problems had mounted under Cromme and former Chief Executive Ekkehard Schulz.
Shareholders taking to the podium at the AGM called Thyssen's ill-advised investment in the Americas a "disaster" and a sign of a "lack of healthy scepticism" by the board.
"Shareholders are shocked about the development of your firm," Thomas Hechtfischer of shareholder rights group DSW said.
Despite shareholder criticism, silver-haired Cromme still looked unlikely to be forced out after 11 years at the helm of Thyssen's supervisory board, because he is backed by Berthold Beitz, the 99-year-old patriarch at its biggest shareholder.
The Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation headed by Beitz has 25.3 percent of the voting rights and has the right to name three members to the 20-member supervisory board, one of them being 69-year-old Cromme.
Current CEO Heinrich Hiesinger, brought in from Siemens by Cromme two years ago, axed half of his management board last month and vowed to do away with self-interested "old boy networks" in the company. He pleaded for shareholders to focus on the company's future rather than on past failings.
"If we continue to focus exclusively on the past we will find countless things that were not appropriate by today's standards," he told the meeting.
Hiesinger became the first Thyssen boss to be hired from outside the steel industry when Cromme brought him over from Siemens two years ago.
He has already launched an overhaul to cut the company's exposure to the volatile steel sector and shift investment into higher-margin products and services such as elevators, submarines or automotive components.
Following the sale of assets with annual sales of 10 billion euros, only about 30 percent of Thyssen's business will come from the steel sector.
But the quagmire in the Americas, a fine for fixing the price of rail tracks and a scandal over luxury press trips have countered Hiesinger's attempt to focus on his renewal efforts.
Thyssen invested billions of euros in Steel Americas - comprising two steel mills in Brazil and Alabama - which cost more than expected to set up and have generated losses since.
"You can do everything right and it will still go wrong," Cromme said. "It is what it is."
($1 = 0.7486 euros)
(Editing by Victoria Bryan and David Holmes)


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30 Apr 2004 Amid the Nightline Controversy, Remember: Our Troops Are Doing A Great Deal of Good
Believing that it is the best way to respond to ABC broadcaster Ted Koppel, The National Center for Public Policy Research today has posted on its website an extensive list of the achievements of just one of the many U.S. units operating in Iraq.
On his April 30 broadcast Koppel will recite the names of all the Americans killed in combat in Iraq.
The list recounts the achievements of the 16th Combat Engineer Battalion, part of the 1st Armored Division, which has been in Iraq since the war started and remains on active duty there at this time. It was provided by Spc. Joe Roche, who serves with the 285-soldier unit.
Earlier this month, newspapers nationwide ran an essay by Roche entitled "Keep the Faith: A Letter from Iraq." The essay's positive recounting of the U.S. military's achievements in Iraq received extensive public attention via talk radio and the Internet.
The list of the unit's achievements over a year's time includes combat operations and very many humanitarian missions.
The achievements list is too long to recount in a press release, but can be viewed at https://nationalcenter.org/2004_04_01_BlogArchive.html#108329938064126347 online.
"The magnitude of the accomplishments of this under-300 man unit in a year's time is simply astonishing," said Amy Ridenour, president of The National Center for Public Policy Research. "Yet this is simply one unit of many U.S., British and other coalition forces operating in Iraq. I strongly encourage Americans to review this list and others. Our troops are doing a great deal of good."
"Keep the Faith: A Letter from Iraq" and other comments from Spc. Roche about his observations in Iraq are available at https://nationalcenter.org/RochePage.html online.
The National Center for Public Policy Research is a non-partisan, conservative/free-market think-tank established in 1982 and located on Capitol Hill. It can be visited at https://nationalcenter.org online.


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An expert research society was established to study quantum computer security
박한철 2021-02-03 View. 58,161An expert research society was established to study quantum computer security that can easily penetrate cryptographic systems used in e-commerce, etc.
KISTI announced on Feb. 01 that it will establish a "quantum security research group" in the Korea Institute of Information Security and Cryptology and take the role of a secretary to research quantum and security technologies.
Public-key cryptographic algorithms used for authentication and digital signatures in electronic financial transactions utilize prime factorization and discrete logarithm problems. The password needs solution to be solved and is highly safe cause it will take decades or more even with supercomputers around the world. However, a quantum computer that uses a quantum mechanical state in which 0 and 1 exist at the same time, rather than the binary systemof 0 and 1, can quickly solve the problem, raising security concerns.
On the 15th of last month, the Korea Institute of Information Security and Cryptology established a quantum security research group for academic development between quantum and security technologies. The goal is to study quantum computer security technologies such as quantum distribution keys and quantum resistant encryption, and to present technical standards and directions. Participants of the research group decided to share related technologies and contribute to information exchange between industry-academia and research institutes by holding bilateral and security technology seminars and training.
Jae-cheol Ryu, President of the Korea Institute of Information Security and Cryptology(Professor of Computer Convergence, Chungnam National University) said, "Quantum and security technology area future technology that members of the society are very interested in and and we will also continue to provide support for the development of the quantum cryptography research conference."
Seok Woo-jin, Director of the KISTI Science and Technology Research Network Center, who served as a secretary of the Quantum Security Research Group, said, "Through this research group, we will continue to strive to cooperate with participants and create research results so that quantum security technology can be incorporated into KISTI's national science and technology research network." .


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Some ingredients are destined to be used in the same predictable way. Take for instance, chickpeas or garbanzo beans. The main reason why I would even bother having this in my pantry is simply to prepare a homemade hummus. After awhile, plain, traditional hummus gets boring. When that happens, the fun begins. I love playing with various flavor combinations and I think I've found my favorite hummus recipe. This Sun Dried Tomato Hummus allows the flavor and color of sun dried tomatoes shine with a little hint of fresh basil to freshen it up…
For my recent Mediterranean Kabob Party, I aimed to have a Mediterranean inspired spread for our guests. This flavored hummus was a hit and so easy to prepare! All the ingredients are processed together and chilled before serving so flavors can meld. The flavor is bright and goes especially well with fresh cucumber slices, baby carrots and warm pita bread.
recipe from AllRecipes
4 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons tahini paste
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
2 (15.5 ounce) cans garbanzo beans, drained
1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 cup oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes, drained
1/4 cup finely shredded fresh basil
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/8 teaspoon paprika (optional)
Place garlic, salt, tahini, and lemon juice into a food processor; process until smooth. Pour in the garbanzo beans and 1/2 cup olive oil; process until smooth again, scraping the sides of the bowl occasionally. Once smooth, add the sun-dried tomatoes, and pulse until they have been chopped to very small pieces and are incorporated into the hummus. Finally, add the basil, and pulse a few times until mixed in.
Spread the hummus into a shallow serving dish, and make a few decorative grooves on top. Refrigerate at least 1 hour, then drizzle with 2 tablespoons olive oil and sprinkle with paprika before serving.


text: I'm a Co-Founder of Foundation for Comprehensive Dispute Resolution (FCDR), Chennai. I have completed 4 training courses ranging from basic training to advanced training. My training focused on all aspects of a successful mediation starting from basic concepts to drafting the final settlement agreement. I have been an active mediator in the Tamil Nadu Mediation and Conciliation Centre, Madras High Court from the year 2005 and have mediated a variety of disputes relating to civil, commercial and matrimonial cases. Further, as one of the five founder trustees of Foundation for Comprehensive Dispute Resolution (FCDR), Chennai, I have mediated cases in the private mediation space as well. I have mediated more than 300 cases and have succeeded in bringing about settlement in nearly one hundred cases. I prefer a combination of styles with a bias for facilitative style of mediation.


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I am stuck with a case and unable to get the desired result from my query..
I have to insert into a table some records based on multiple records from 2 different tables..
Tables: Target: player_list_items
Source1: list_items
Source2: map_details
A player is supposed to play a list which contains a list of items; A list needs to be played over a map.
The map contains placeholders with their certain X and Y positions and I need to place list_items behind those placeholders. for that I have created the target table that will contain the list_items positioned randomly behind the placeholders.
Below is the query in which I was able to dump the list_items for a user into the target table but, now the problem is that how to get X and Y positions randomly for each list_items from the source2 table.
My First Query:
INSERT INTO player_list_items
(player_list_list_id, player_list_player_id, player_list_item_id, player_list_item_cellX, player_list_item_cellY)
SELECT li.list_item_list_id, 584488596, li.list_item_item_id, 2, 5
FROM list_items li
WHERE li.list_item_list_id = 2
Each list contains multiple items so the above query returns multiple items and its working fine, what needs to be considered is that the map_details table also contains multiple place holders and they would be more than the # of list_items for sure.
The required query is supposed to get all positions X and Y from the map_details table and assign then randomly to each individual item, positions for every item must be unique.
I have seen examples of multiple selects for insert but they are for single row insertion and my problem is multiple rows from multiple tables and random too.
My 2nd query:
INSERT INTO player_list_items (player_list_list_id, player_list_player_id, player_list_item_id, player_list_item_cellX, player_list_item_cellY)
SELECT list_item_list_id, 656328662, list_item_item_id, game_map_details.cellX, game_map_details.cellY
FROM list_items
JOIN (SELECT * FROM game_map_details WHERE map_id = 1 ORDER BY RAND()) AS game_map_details
WHERE list_item_list_id = 2
GROUP BY list_item_item_id
This do adds the data from the map_details table but the data is not random, in fact its inserting only 1 pair of record for all 4 records from list_items table


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Depeche Mode / Sounds of the Universe
Now sold out.
There's a rare sale on over at the SDE shop. We're clearing out our remaining stock of the box set edition of Depeche Mode's 2009 album Sounds Of The Universe.
The video below tells you everything you need to know. It's a stunning set with album, demos, 5.1, remixes, two books, badges and more.
These were an already cheap £30, but are now on sale for a barely credible £15! This will be primarily of interest to fans in Europe, since shipping further afield is rather prohibitive (sorry).
Buy the Depeche Mode Sounds of the Universe box set for £15.
40 Comments
40 Comments


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by Mordechai Kedar
Read the article in the original עברית
Read the article in Italiano (translated by Yehudit Weisz, edited by Angelo Pezzana)
At the end of last week, for the first time in its history, free democratic elections were held in Libya for the 200 members of the Transitional Legislative Council; 120 "independent" members, meaning representatives of tribes and cities, and 80 representatives from nationwide political parties. As of this writing, the official results have still not been publicized, but according to the assessment of observers, Islamic forces have won a minority of seats in parliament. It should be mentioned that during the past year a Salafi jihadist stream led by Abd al-Hakim Belhadj appeared in Libya, which was a cause of very great concern to some external observers.
Libya is a desert country, part of the dry, arid Great Sahara Desert. Life in the desert constrains its residents to live within the framework of a clan, the size of which is limited by available sources of livelihood in the desert environment. Near a spring and its vegetation, which provides food and drink for them and their flocks, they would prefer to remain within a larger framework which would enable them to defend the sources of their livelihood. But in this arid environment of scant resources, they practice that which Abraham said to Lot in the Judean Desert "Please part from me" (Genesis 13: 9) and thus they live within smaller frameworks. The smaller the group, the more solidarity, toughness and cruelty is demanded in order to defend itself, its sources of livelihood and the honor of its daughters and wives from outsiders,
In Libya there is another factor which has had the effect of increasing tribal cohesion, and this is the dictatorial regime of Qadhaffi. In the context of life under a dictator, in which the tribe also serves as a defense of the individual against the oppression of the regime, the regime must work with the tribe, which defends the individual, in such a way as to arrive at agreements with the tribe and to honor its autonomy and interests, its leaders and its laws and customs. The desert tribe gives its members immunity from the state apparatuses; the situation of the Bedouin in the Negev vis a vis the Israeli government and in Sinai vis a vis the Egyptian government, are a good examples of this.
The conditions of the desert combined with the dictatorship of Qadhaffi created a situation where the great majority of the Libyan population was engaged in an ongoing battle against the forces of nature and the cruelty of man. This situation strengthened the tribal frameworks and turned them into fearless and merciless fighting militiamen. The difficulties create toughness, the battle justifies violence and the problems strengthen solidarity. This situation explains why Qadhaffi had to be so cruel in order to impose his rule upon the population, because there must be a match between the level of violence practiced by a society and the violence that a regime must use in order to subdue a society to submit to his authority for an extended period. There are rumors in Libya that the number of kalashnikovs possessed by the populace is twice the number of residents. Even if this rumor is an exaggeration, it is not far from the bitter and violent reality of this state, because people have weapons and will use them whenever a disagreement arises between them, and where a society engages in blood feuds, it is very difficult to put an end to them, and they continue for a long time and cause many casualties.
The Western democratic model is built on a basic rule, which is that everyone - individuals as well as groups - is constrained not to act with violence but to conduct disagreements and conflicts between them in a legitimate way, not by violence. Another principle in a democratic system is the importance of the individual who goes to the poll and votes according to his conscience, not according to the dictates of his family. However the elimination of the tribal framework and its function is an impossible task in the short run, and therefore young democracies must allow traditional, ethnic, tribal, religious and sectarian frameworks to express themselves, within a young democratic system. This forces it to fight for its legitimacy and survival vis a vis long-standing frameworks that are traditional, legitimate, strong, and sometimes violent .
Libya is a tribal society with a recent dictatorial past, and should not be expected to erase its tribal character and become an individualistic society overnight. A Marxist experiment such as this was carried out in South Yemen between 1967 and 1990, and failed. The migration to the city as a result of the development of an oil-based economy created in Libya a stratum of people with a local consciousness and less of a tribal one, but the characteristics of its behavior within the new framework are no different from those that characterized behavior within the tribal framework. The Bedouin proverb says: "It is easy to take the Bedouin out of the desert, but difficult to take the desert out of the Bedouin".
Since Qadhaffi was overthrown a year ago, conflicts have broken out between the tribes and the main ethnic groups in Libya, Arabs and Berbers, and it was clear that the new political framework, in order to be an acceptable and legitimate system, must consider the social, tribal structure of the population and not try to fight it. Therefore, the National Transitional Council which has been managing the state since the fall of Qadhaffi, pre-allocated 120 seats, which is 60 percent of the 200 seats of the parliament that was elected at the end of last week, to "independent representatives", meaning representatives of the tribes and the cities, and only 40 percent of the representatives (80 seats) from general national parties which are based on ideology, not on the tribe. The results were as expected: the Islamists were in the minority and the liberals, along with the independent representatives of the tribes, formed the majority.
Those in Libya who are responsible for planning the elections, learned from the experience of Tunisia and Egypt, who allocated much weight to the general national ideological parties, and this enabled the Islamist parties to win the leadership positions, since they were better organized than the liberal parties, their leadership has religious approval and they have organized, recognized and coherent ideologies. Liberals, who are usually anonymous, transmit new, unknown, incoherent ideas, which are usually not clearly understood by the population, part of which cannot read or write, and therefore are unable to win over large portions of the young democratic system in a tribal society. And if the Liberals transmit messages contrary to the religion or the tribal tradition, they are rejected.
The elections that were held in Libya were intended to set up a group that will write the constitution for the state, meaning the prescription according to which authorities will be divided between the parliament, the president, the legal system and the military. It is evident that in Libya they are learning from the failed experiments of Egypt, in which the military, which was appointed by Mubarak, and according to a legal ruling from Mubarak's era, dispersed the democratically elected Islamic parliament, greatly diminished the authorities of the Islamist president, who was also elected democratically, and cannot set up a body that will write the constitution for the state. The parliament in Libya is intended to allow a greater expression to the social mosaic of Libya, and to create an arena for political battle which is not violent and will not engender a contest between the liberals and the Islamists within it, and all of this without undermining its typical tribal character,.
No need to get excited by the announcements of people in Libya that Islamic Shari'a will be the basis for legislation in Libya, because - unlike Egypt where about one tenth of the citizens are Coptic Christians - all of the citizens of Libya are Muslims, and Shari'a guides their way. The tribal culture does not usually carry out amputation of the hands of thieves, and if someone sips a beer or whiskey in his house, the tribe will not necessarily make a big deal out of it. The fact that the Islamists, who won the lead in Tunisia and Egypt, have not solved the problems of their states diminishes the attractiveness of the Muslim Brotherhood motto "The Solution is Islam", and in Libya apparently the feeling is widespread that in reality, this is not the solution.
The new regime in Libya will have to find the teetering balance point between tribalism and individualism, between tradition and modernism, between Islam and liberalism, taking into account the divided, or even fragmented, social structure of the population, in the centers of power such as Tripolitania in the West, Cyrenaica in the East and Sabha in the South, with the local economic interests that are connected with the oil industry, and especially - with the many weapons that are in the hands of the population and the willingness of their owners to use them without warning.
No doubt, the task of post-Qadhaffi Libya is difficult; the road is long but the alternative is to return to dictatorship or to sink into a swamp of fire, blood and tears, that no one will be able to escape from. From this honorable stage I send the wishes of the citizens of Israel to our Libyan friends, that they will succeed in the enormous task that history has imposed upon them; that they will lead Libya forward towards success, and that they will remember that on the Eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea there is a small democratic state that is willing to share with Libya its experience in industry, agriculture, desalination of water, water management, research, development, science and art.
Dr. Mordechai Kedar (firstname.lastname@example.com) is an Israeli scholar of Arabic and Islam, a lecturer at Bar-Ilan University and the director of the Center for the Study of the Middle East and Islam (under formation), Bar Ilan University, Israel. He specializes in Islamic ideology and movements, the political discourse of Arab countries, the Arabic mass media, and the Syrian domestic arena.
Translated from Hebrew by Sally Zahav.
Links to Dr. Kedar's recent articles on this blog:
- Jordan and Radical Islam
- The Brothers and the Muslms
- What's Next for Saudi Arabia?
- An Open Letter to President Asad
- The Suffering of Africa - Sins of Europe - Guilt of Israel
- What Drives Turkey?
- Engulfed by Fear
- The Syrian Crisis Spills Over into Lebanon
- The Frustrated Intellectual
- Syria, Iraq, the Gulf and the Iranian Tentacles
- The Failure of the Palestinian Venture
- Is Islam the Solution?
- Radical Islam in Africa
- What's Really Going on in Gaza?
- The Alternative Homeland
- The Real Thing
- The Division of Syria
- The Death Throes of the Lion
- An Old Governmental System in Formation
- Frustration and Extortion
- Thank You, Hamas
- Drums of War in the Gulf
- 2011: The Year of the Arab Winter
- And This is the Gate of Heaven
- In the Shadow of the Rising Islamic Crescent
- Who Stole My Revolution
- The Noose Tightens
- The Desert of Death
- Jihad Forever
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.


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DK Science: Oxygen
On Earth, oxygen is more common than any other element. It is an invisible, odourless gas that makes up 21 per cent of air. Oxygen is found in water, minerals, and almost all living things. It is essential to life. Ordinary oxygen molecules contain two oxygen atoms. Ozone, a three-atom form, is found high up in the atmosphere. Oxygen moves through the environment via the OXYGEN CYCLE.
Divers wear a SCUBA (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus), so they can breathe under water. The SCUBA contains a cylinder of compressed air, which divers carry on their backs. The air is compressed (or squeezed) into the cylinder to increase the amount of air the divers can carry. Divers breathe through a regulator, which decompresses the air as it comes out of the cylinder.
In 1774, this chemist announced his discovery of oxygen. He didn't realize that Swedish chemist Carl Scheele (1742–1786) had found it first, a year or two previously. They both showed that air is not one element. Priestley also discovered how to combine carbon dioxide with water to make fizzy water.
Almost all living things, including humans, need oxygen to survive. Both plants and animals take in oxygen from their surroundings to release energy. Underwater plants and animals cannot use the oxygen in air – instead they use oxygen dissolved in water. The oxygen cycle continuously circulates oxygen through the environment, so it is always available to all living things.
Plants are able to use the energy of sunlight to convert carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O) into carbohydrates and oxygen (O2) in a process called photosynthesis. This oxygen is taken in by plants and animals to provide energy, releasing carbon dioxide and water. This process is called respiration.


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The pure products of America don't always go crazy: Dr. Williams himself is a demonstration of this. But the effort of remaining both pure and American can make them look odd and harassed—a lopsided appearance characteristic of much major American poetry, whose fructifying mainstream sometimes seems to be peopled mostly by cranks (Emerson, Whitman, Pound, Stevens), while certified major poets (Frost, Eliot) somehow end up on the sidelines. This is suggested again by the unexpected appearance of two voluminous Collected Poems by two poets who now seem destined to pass abruptly from the status of minor to major cranks.
Both John Wheelwright and A. R. Ammons are full of tics and quirks; both frequently write as though poetry could not be a vehicle of major utterance, as though it were itself a refutation of any such mythic nonsense; in both the poem is not so much a chronicle of its own making as of its unmaking. Often, as in Ammons's "Working Still" or Wheelwright's "North Atlantic Passage," the final product looks like a mess of disjointed notes for a poem. Yet each poet finishes by stretching our recognition of what a poem can be and in so doing carries the notion of poetry a little higher and further. Each seems destined to end up, albeit kicking and struggling, as classic American.
Unexpected is perhaps not the word for the publication of Wheelwright's Collected Poems; it was first announced on the jacket of a small pamphlet of his Selected Poems published by New Directions in 1941, a few months after Wheelwright was killed by a drunken driver in Boston at the age of forty-three. Why the present volume has been in the works for so long is not explained, and is all the more inexplicable in view of Wheelwright's close ties with so many well-known writers of his time, to whom many of the poems are dedicated: Robert Fitzgerald, Malcolm Cowley, Matthew Josephson, James Agee, Archibald MacLeish, Allen Tate, Howard Nemerov, Horace Gregory, and Wheelwright's brother-in-law S. Foster Damon, to name a few. If at least some of these were his close friends it seems strange that no one, including James Laughlin (another dedicatee), has managed until now to rescue this brilliant poet's work from obscurity.
Perhaps there was some kind of opposition from the family, and one suspects also that many of the writers with whom "Jack" was on close terms appreciated his engaging personality and odd political views (Boston Brahmin-Anglo-Catholic-Trotskyite) but drew the line at his "recalcitrant" (the apt word is that of his editor, Alvin Rosenfeld) verse. Three volumes—Rock and Shell, Mirrors of Venus, Political Self-Portrait—were published in his lifetime by the Boston publisher Bruce Humphries in tiny editions and have long been unobtainable, as has the New Directions pamphlet; a fourth collection, Dusk to Dusk, was ready for publication at the time of Wheelwright's death and now appears for the first time in the Collected Poems, along with some hitherto uncollected poems.
Besides the mystery of the book's long-delayed arrival, Mr. Rosenfeld's thoughtful preface leaves several other questions unanswered. Where are the original texts of the previously unpublished poems, and how were the present readings established? The fact that a poem published in the 1941 Selected Poems as "Staircase Thoughts" appears here in somewhat different form as "Esprit d'Escalier," while another now called "In the Bathtub, to Mnemosyne" was printed in the earlier volume as "Bathtub Thoughts" with a final stanza which has here been omitted, suggests that significantly different versions of other poems might well exist.
One wonders too about the sketches for a long poem on St. Thomas (the skeptic-believer Wheelwright's favorite saint) which Mr. Rosenfeld says were "deemed too fragmentary for publication," and whether there are other such fragments. What happened to the book on American architecture which Wheelwright, whose father was for a time city architect of Boston and built among other things the Stadium Bridge in Cambridge and the troubadour-style Lampoon Building, was working on at the end of his life? These are, of course, secondary questions which will have to await a later stage of Wheelwright scholarship; meanwhile one hopes that the present volume will initiate that stage.
Wheelwright is a difficult poet, not merely for the erudition he presupposes though this in itself is intimidating. His own footnotes usually compound the difficulties. One poem, he says, "is a literal contradiction to Oliver Wendell Holmes' The Voiceless"; another "quotes the Hymnal, the Psalter, the Bhagavad Gita, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Stonewall Jackson, and an anonymous ejaculation made at the Jamestown [sic] Flood." Elsewhere it is a question of Baring-Gould's Lost and Hostile Gospels, "Walker's translation of a Nestorian novel on the Acts of Thomas," "Maurice Samuel's translation of Edmond Flegg's Jewish Anthology," Böhme, Engels, Dietzgen, "the Journal of Pastor Higgenson," and, even more to the point, episodes from the poet's private life: " 'Lobster Cove,' an essay in pastoral, represents what occupied the end of a day at the Madame Goss House in Annisquam, on Cape Ann, while the Author was brushing up some chores for the Damons." (The reader will look in vain for a poem with this title in the Collected Poems; it was one of the titles, here omitted, of the nine groups of poems that comprise Political Self-Portrait.)
I say even more to the point because Wheelwright's literary references, if they could be tracked down, would finally be of as little help in explicating the poetry as are the unstated facts of his biography, which are given the same telescoped, allusive treatment. This is not to say that the references don't matter; they, or their abstruseness, matter crucially in the long theological epics, where there are stretches unrelieved by the chiaroscuro glitter of the equally obdurate but less programmatic lyrics. But the difficulty proceeds less from arcane allusions than from Wheelwright's peculiarly elliptical turn of mind which convolutes and compresses clarities to the point of opacity. There is no more point in doing one's homework first than there is with the Cantos: one has to wade in, grasping at what is graspable and letting the extraordinarily charged lyrical climate accustom one little by little to the at first blinding brightness or darkness.
Ellipsis is not a principle of construction, as with Pound, nor is there a willful, romantic obscuring impulse like Crane's. Wheelwright demands that we follow a logic perceptible to him but only intermittently so to us, and that we be prepared to abandon it without warning for another kind of poetic logic. If Crane's poetry presents a baroque façade, Wheelwright's is the architectural underpinnings and calculations that would support such a façade, which we glimpse only rarely in his calmer, lyrical moments. Meanwhile the feats of engineering that we can take in are almost enough in themselves.
It is best perhaps to start with the shorter, seemingly easier poems, not because they are actually much easier but because they contain some of his most radically original poetry unburdened by a narrative or dialectical function. This one, "Familiar," is from Dusk to Dusk:
O, gilded Boston State House; O, gleaming Irish hair!
I saw Lady Bountiful taking a walk in clean sunlight.
A goodlooking girl, if only she hadn't lips for eyelids.
I thought I saw two persons, and I got all mixed up.
You see, it was this way…Lady Bountiful was modestly, even stylishly
dressed in two dimensions. But Lady Bountiful's shadow
had three dimensions, and crept behind like
pickpocket stenches of belches of Welch wenches.
Even while beginning to wonder what this is all about, one is overtaken by its conviction. I think it succeeds, just as I think the very next one, "Stranger," doesn't:
(While Boston blossoms into one brown rose)
how is it, Girlie, on your way
from Saroyan's whimsy play
Over the Hills and Far Away
to suffocate black incubator babies
that you carry a tall walking stick
embossed with the many-breasted Artemis;
but rubbed on its prepuce nether tip?
Did you lift it from my steady's mother?
In both cases I am unsure of what is being said, but also fairly sure that it doesn't matter, that we are in the presence of something as dumbfounding as Cubism must have seemed to its first spectators and as valid as it now looks in retrospect.
Even at his most direct Wheelwright is up to something other than what appears, as in "Dinner Call," a poem about a posthumous visit from Amy Lowell. The setting owes something to the Eliot of "Aunt Helen" and "The Boston Evening Transcript." The specter of the poetess arrives "while my Aunt and I were sitting round the house/waiting for the time to come for us to be sitting/and waiting for the time to drink our tea,/what brought her to Nantucket seven months after decent burial?/Digging up color for Scrimshaw and Jade Fish?" Miss Lowell gossips about her recent post-mortem activities as this seemingly prosaic but incredible domestic scene unfolds:
When Anna carried in the urn, the lamp, slop-bowl, the pot, et cetera for tea, the Sacrament of tact; Aunt Dolly lit the alcohol.
Whereat, from that oracular orifice and steaming snout of repartee, the kettle's grape tendril of vapor gushed:
"Amy's got next the tripod of cookies,—great girl; she helps herself while helping others…(It's hot spit shut my eye.)
Let's let her let us help ourselves,—look how she takes up the entire settle…" (The lamp went out.)
She departs and the narrator accompanies her for a while until their paths separate:
But I turned for "Good-bye" to Amy Lowell, Biggest Traveling One-Man Show since Buffalo Bill caught the Midnight Flyer to contact Mark Twain:
"One would be inclined, at moments, to doubt the entire death!" I shouted.
Grinning from ear to ear, she shouted back: "Mr. Brooks, you are perfectly right;—one would be."
We know, because Matthew Josephson mentions it in a recent memoir of Wheelwright in Southern Review, that Wheelwright met Amy Lowell at the home of one of his aunts; that he once nettled her at a lecture she gave at Harvard by asking, "Miss Lowell, how do you write when you have nothing to say?" and that he later explained he had merely meant, "How does one write when one has nothing to say?" Yet the poem, which Josephson calls "a rather jocular elegy for Miss Lowell," seems to work on a number of levels: first as anecdote, though even here much remains to be explained. Why is the ghost returning? Why the sarcastic parting at the end? Wheelwright alludes to their exchange at Harvard, but a reader unfamiliar with the incident might well take it as another fictive bauble and miss the point.
Obviously the poem is satirical, but who or what is being satirized? If it is Miss Lowell, we are not told why. Wheelwright's attitude toward her and her poetry is tongue-in-cheek but uncommitted. And what is the function of the ghastly evocation of her corpse, straight out of El Topo: "As the lime rose, her neck turned grey, like stale ashes/of cigars; but gushes of dead blood mounted her neck./They flowed through her head; the cheeks turned red; the lips/glowed like scars. But her eyes? Her eyes were frightened." Yet finally these questions scarcely matter. What matters is that the poem is alive and crackling with satire loosened from its object; it stands free of its narrative armature, though it could scarcely have come into being without it.
This is true of much of the poetry, including the long poems, and it points to a central problem: that lacking the precise reference, which is often not literary but autobiographical, we are forced back on the tributary beauties of the language, which are however frequently so substantial as to carry the poem alone. In this Wheelwright resembles another rediscovered Yankee crackpot genius, Charles Ives, whose gifts didn't rule out occasional lapses into tedium which cannot and should not be isolated from the rest, because they too stem from an ambitious plan which was completely apparent only to its author but whose energy enlivens even the barren passages. Nevertheless there will have to be a study of Wheelwright's sources before major poems such as the arcane closet drama "Morning," published here for the first time, can be appraised for more than their coldly felicitous Landor-like purple passages.
Still, almost any random page from Wheelwright makes one want to persevere. A suggestion of the difficulties and delights ahead can be found in the remarkable ars poetica (of a sort) called "Verse + Radio = Poetry," published by Rosenfeld and S. Foster Damon in Southern Review (Spring, 1972):
The music of poetry is more than sound—its music consists in the presentation of ideas as themes repeated, contradicted, and developed like musical ideas…. Ideological music is closely related to disassociation of associated ideas and the association of the disassociated. This philosophical process must constantly go on, in answer to constantly changing society, for ages and generations and for individuals from childhood to old age and from mood to mood. This makes spirits athletic, not only to guard against the change but to welcome change. The poetry keeps you awake. If it makes you dream, it warns you that you are half asleep.
I can't leave Wheelwright without quoting in full one of his most beautiful poems, "Why Must You Know?" from Rock and Shell, to which one can return again and again, savoring it without penetrating its secret:
—"What was that sound we heard
fall on the snow?"
—"It was a frozen bird.
Why must you know?
All the dull earth knows the good
that the air, with claws and wings
tears to the scattered questionings
which burn in fires of our blood."
"Let the air's beak and claws carry my deeds
far, where no springtime thaws the frost for their seeds."
—"One could fathom every sound
that the circling blood can tell
who heard the diurnal syllable,
while lying close against the ground."
"My flesh, bone and sinew now would discern
hidden waters in you Earth, waters that burn."
—"One who turns to earth again
finds solace in its weight; and deep
hears the blood forever keep
the silence between drops of rain."
The clear mystery, the cold passion, and the warm intelligence are there in equal proportion.
A. R. Ammons's Collected Poems comes almost as unheralded as Wheelwright's sudden belated materialization. Ammons's first book, Ommateum, published in 1955, seems not to have attracted much attention his second appeared nine years later. Recently he has been more prolific, and critics, particularly Harold Bloom and Richard Howard, have considered his work seriously and at length, but few had probably anticipated a Collected Poems of such dimensions (almost 400 pages, to which must be added the recent Norton reissue in a separate volume of his 200-page poem Tape for the Turn of the year). If his importance was suspected before, it is now, as so often happens, confirmed merely by the joining of several volumes in one—not only because the solidity and brilliance are at last fully apparent but because, as also often happens, the occasionally weaker early poems somehow illuminate and give access to the big, difficult later ones.
Without wishing to fall into the trap of comparing Wheelwright and Ammons merely because of the hazards of publication, one cannot help being struck by certain resemblances. Both are American originals (in the French sense of un original as someone who is also quite eccentric), and they are products as much of the American landscape as of its poetic tradition, in devious ways. Wheelwright's relation to New England is as tenuous but as real as Ives's cacophonous The Housatonic at Stockbridge is to the bucolic scene which prompted it. The relation lies deeper than resemblance. Ammons's landscape is American sidereal; a descendant of Emerson, as Bloom has pointed out, he is always on the brink of being "whirled/Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear" from the safe confines of backyard or living room. But the fascination of his poetry is not the transcendental but his struggle with it, which tends to turn each poem into a battleground strewn with scattered testimony to the history of its making in the teeth of its creator's reluctance and distrust of "all this fiddle."
Reading the poems in sequence one soon absorbs this rhythm of making-unmaking, of speech facing up to the improbability of speech, so that ultimately Ammons's landscape—yard, riverbed, ocean, mountain, desert, and soon "the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark"—releases the reader to the clash of word against word, to what Harold Bloom calls his "oddly negative exuberance." The movement is the same, from the visible if only half-real flotsam of daily living to the uncertainties beyond, but one forgets this from one poem to the next; each is as different as a wave is from the one that follows and obliterates it. One is left, like the author at the end of his best-known poem, "Corsons Inlet," "enjoying the freedom that/Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,/that I have perceived nothing completely,/that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk."
The poet's work is like that of Penelope ripping up her web into a varicolored heap that tells the story more accurately than the picture did. And meanwhile the "regional" has become universal, at an enormous but unavoidable cost; the destructiveness of the creative act in Ammons ("what / destruction am I / blessed by?") permits him to escape, each time, the temptations of the paysage moralisé. Much has been written about the relation of the so-called "New York School" of poets to the painting of men like Pollock, but in a curious way Ammons's poetry seems a much closer and more successful approximation of "Action Painting" or art as process. ("The problem is / how to keep shape and flow.")
Marianne Moore pointed out that "inns are not residences," and a similar basic corrective impulse runs throughout Ammons, giving rise to a vocabulary of pivotal words. "Saliences" (the title of one of his best poems), "suasion," "loft," "scary," "motion," and "extreme" are a few which assume their new meaning only after a number of encounters, a meaning whose sharpness corrects a previous one whose vagueness was more dangerous than we knew. A "loft" (also frequently used as a verb) is not a summit, but a way station and possibly the last one; saliences are pertinent and outstanding but not necessarily to be confused with meanings; suasion is neither persuasion nor dissuasion. The corrective impulse proceeds as much from prudence as from modesty; in any case it can coexist with occasional outbursts of pure egotism: "I want a squirrel-foil for my martin pole / I want to perturb some laws of balance / I want to create unnatural conditions" (but the poem of which this is the beginning is entitled "The Imagined Land"), just as Ammons's frugality and his relentless understatement are countered by the swarming profusion of the poems.
This austerity could lose its point in the course of such a long volume: the restricted palette; the limited cast of characters (bluejays, squirrels, and other backyard denizens figure prominently, along with the poet's wife, child, and car, not to forget the wind with whom he has dialogues frequently in a continuing love-hate relationship); the sparse iconography of plant, pebble, sand, leaf, twig, bone, end by turning the reader back from the creature comforts he might have expected from "nature" poetry to the dazzlingly self-sufficient logic which illuminates Ammons's poetry and in turn restores these samples from nature to something of their Wordsworthian splendor—but Wordsworth recollected in the tranquillity of midcentury mindless America, and after the ironic refractions of Emerson, Stevens, and Williams. For despite Ammons's misgivings, his permanent awareness of "a void that is all being, a being that is void," his "negative exuberance" is of a kind that could exist only after the trials of so much negation.
I can't think of a thing to uphold:
the carborundum plant snows
sift-scum on the slick, outgoing river
and along the avenues car wheels
float in a small powder: my made-up
mind idles like a pyramid….
—from "Working Still"
But if he is unable to find a saving word for the polluted (in so many ways) American scene, his speech elevates it even as it refuses to transform it. "No American poet," writes Harold Bloom in an essay on Ammons, "When You Consider the Radiance," in his book The Ringers in the Tower, "not Whitman or Stevens, shows us so fully something otherwise unknown in the structures of the national consciousness as Ammons does." And for Americans who feel that America is the last truly foreign country, this something comes startlingly alive in poem after poem, as in the magnificent "One: Many":
…and on and on through the villages,
along dirt roads, ditchbanks, by gravel pits and on to the homes, to the citizens and their histories,
inventions, longings:
I think how enriching, though unassimilable as a whole
into art, are the differences: the small-business
man in Kansas City declares an extra dividend
and his daughter who teaches school in Du- quesne
buys a Volkswagen, a second car for the family:
out of many, one
from variety an over-riding unity, the expression of
How perfect and how funny in its Whitmanesque nod to the automotive industry is that "buys a Volkswagen, a second car for the family": it seems as much by its music as by its sense to sum up everything that is beautiful and wrong in our vast, monotonous, but very much alive landscape. And Ammons knows this well; he ends the poem with an unemotional summation that, in its reluctant acceptance of the "opaque" world that is still "world enough to take my time, stretch my reason, hinder / and free me," can also stand for the work:
no book of laws, short of unat- tainable reality itself,
can anticipate every event,
control every event: only the book
of laws founded against itself,
founded on freedom of each event to occur as itself,
lasts into the inevitable balances events will take.
This Issue
February 22, 1973


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- Adobe Inc accessibility page.
- Macromedia Flash accessibility: guidelines, techniques and toolkit for improving accessibility of Flash presentations . See now accessibility announcement on accessibility features for media player and developer software
- Making educational software and websites accessible : guidelines including maths/science solutions from WGBH Boston (US access experts)
- Accessible Forms using WCAG 2.0
- Guidelines for accessible online forms (Mandoforms.com / RNIB UK)
- World Wide Web access: Disability Discrimination Act Advisory Note from the Commission
- Government 2.0 submission
- Australian Government Information Management Office accessibility page
- Webwatch: accessibility issues on Australian Government sites
- New Zealand Government web standards wiki
- UK Disability Rights Commission/British Standards Institute guidance
- National Information and Library Service index of Australian web access policies and guidelines
- NOIE minimum website standards
- Australian National Audit Office Better Practice Guide accessibility chapter : prepared in conjunction with the Commission. The full Guide is available on the ANAO site
- NSW Government guidelines on provision of information and services using the internet
- Best practice guidelines for Australian legal web sites: Legal Information Standards Council
- U.K. guidelines for government websites including links to handbook and training resources
- Internet industry Accessible Web Action Plan : see Internet Industry Association press release and Commission press release
- "Wise web weaving: guidelines for web site development": Department of Education, Tasmania
Tools and techniques
Building accessible sites
- U.K. Royal National Institute for the Blind web access centre
- Austin Accessibility Internet Rally training materials
- Disabled Accessibility , J.Nielsen
- Web accessibility: Joe Clark: online version; book also available
- "OptionKeys: Developing Accessible WebSites": resources and advice from TAFE NSW
- "Building an accessible web site", A.Kahn
- "Accessible web design: a definition", C. Letourneau
- UK accessible design page from C. Mardiros
- A web designer's guide to JAWS (screen reader program)
- Making forms more accessible: S.Faulkner, NILS Australia
Checking accessibility
- World Wide Web Consortium resource on Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility
- Cynthia Says online or downloadable accessibility checking program
- Accessibility testing tools: UK Royal National Institute for the Blind
- A-prompt web page accessibility tool
- Accessibility checking service
- Hermish: UK accessibility tools
Layout and readibility
Guidelines from Vision Australia
Workshops and training
Email us at firstname.lastname@example.com to add details of other training events you are aware of.
- Workshops from Vision Australia on web accessibility and writing for the web
Legal issues
- Decision in Maguire v SOCOG : $20000 damages ordered under Australia's Disability Discrimination Act for site inaccessibility
- United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on "The Applicability of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to Private Internet Sites" -- February 9, 2000; and additional testimony by Dr Gregg Vanderheiden
- Web accessibility Web Accessibility in Australia - A Definitive Guide 2023
- See also the Commission's working paper reviewing accessibility of Australian Government sites in late 1999.
- Press release: DDA still covers internet despite US decision (23 October)
- Information technology and disability journal special issue
Other resources
- UK Disability Rights Commission accessibility survey and comments by Web Accessibility Initiative
- U.K. Disability Rights Commission demonstration of inaccessible web sites
- European Design for All E-Accessibility Network
- NOIE accessibility page
- "The Web Accessibility Initiative", M.Margolin
- Campaign for a non browser-specific World Wide Web
- Barrier free access to seniors computing clubs
- Euroaccessibility consortium
- "Top ten mistakes in web design", "Top Ten Mistakes Revisited", "Top-10 New Mistakes of Web Design", J.Nielsen
- "To hell with WCAG 2": Joe Clark
- "Pokemons in the Amazon Jungle: Web Accessibility, Disability Discrimination, and the WOW Factor"
Presentation to Web Essentials 2004 Conference, September 30, 2004, Bruce Maguire, Policy Officer, Australian Human Rights Commission


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TechRadar Verdict
- +
Designed to complement most screens
- +
Easy to use
- -
Lack of visual info
- -
Bass heavy main unit
- -
Auto-selects TV input
Why you can trust TechRadar
The Panasonic SC-HTB520's sheer presence will spoil the immaculate appearance of your TV on its stand, but with a Hobbit-esque height of less than 8cm it shouldn't affect viewing or block the IR receiver for your TV.
Should it need to, the SC-HTB520 can also pass on commands from your TV's remote control to the screen via an IR blaster. A much more elegant solution is to mount both screen and bar on a wall, and the SC-HTB520 is supplied with two brackets for this purpose.
The 120W gloss black subwoofer is as attractive as these things get, plus it can be squirreled away out of sight behind the sofa, thanks to its wi-fi connection to the main unit.
The straightforward two-way, two-speaker, bass reflex layout of the main unit is faintly visible behind the non-removable grille that covers the entire front. With no LCD display to use, trying to balance the subwoofer and main unit's separate volume controls proves to be a bit of a lark.
The SC-HTB520 isn't interested in anything analogue, wearing its digital stripes with pride. With two v1.4 HDMIs and a digital optical audio input, the idea is that you route sound and picture from a Blu-ray or DVD deck to the HDMI input and optically connect from your screen's digital output.
The HDMI output then pipes the video signal to your screen, but this socket can also receive your TV's sound output if the latter has an audio return channel (ARC) HDMI. This also frees up the digital optical socket for use with Dolby Digital signals from a console, Sky HD or Virgin Media TiVo box.
Curiously, every time I switched the unit on it defaulted to the TV input within five seconds, even without an ARC feed or an optical cable connection and I manually had to reselect the HDMI input.
An onboard decoder is equipped to handle DTS and Dolby Digital signals, which are output as pseudo-surround Dolby Virtual Speaker and the unit can accept up to 7.1-ch linear PCM.
Operating the system couldn't be easier; you simply select the source and adjust the volume levels of both units. Dialogue in particular really stands out. With the Monsters Vs Aliens Blu-ray wedding scene, the dialogue between Derek and Susan is crystal clear.
On a more subtle level you can even make out the rustle of her veil at the altar, and as the church falls apart you feel the creaking wood and impact of the tower as it smashes on the ground. All in all, everything feels nicely controlled.
However, other sources reveal how bass-heavy the main unit is. With the sub turned right down, the double bass of The Wire's theme tune vibrates uncomfortably, while MTV Eminem's Lose Yourself has too much thud. Despite this, vocals always shine through and the overall effect is certainly positive.
While you can't crank things up high and the so-called pseudo surround is not even pretending, the general improvement over any TV's speakers is immeasurable
Follow TechRadar Reviews on Twitter: http://twitter.com/techradarreview
Shattering the 'copper or optics' paradigm: humble plastic could become key material in race to conquer AI data center market - it is cheaper, lighter, thinner and more power efficient
Quordle today – hints and answers for Saturday, February 24 (game #761)
You can now try out Samsung's Galaxy AI on any smartphone – here's how


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LITTLE ROCK – More than 55,000 low-income Arkansans have told the state they want to sign up for coverage under a recently approved plan to use Medicaid funds to purchase private insurance under the federal health care law, the Department of Human Services said Wednesday.
The department said it planned to begin mailing out letters to the 55,440 people instructing them on how to enroll in the state's "private option," approved by the federal government last week as an alternative to expanding Medicaid's enrollment under the federal health care law.
"This clearly shows there was a need for the unique approach that Arkansas took to help ensure the lowest-income Arkansans have access to quality health insurance," DHS Director John Selig said in a written statement.
Under the private option law, Arkansas will use federal money to buy private insurance for about 250,000 eligible low-income residents. The program allows people who earn up to 138 percent of the poverty line – or $15,415 per year – to buy subsidized private insurance through the state's insurance exchange.
The Republican-led Legislature and Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe approved the private option in April as an alternative to expanding Medicaid. Several other states have expressed interest in a similar program.
Open enrollment in the exchange began Tuesday and runs through March 31.
DHS spokeswoman Amy Webb said the department mailed letters to 154,420 people it had identified through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as eligible for the private option. Through the letters, the state was also able to enroll 2,539 previously uninsured children in its ARKids First health coverage program.
The potential participants had to sign a form signaling their interest and acknowledging that the private option coverage could end at any moment. That acknowledgement was required under the state law setting up the expanded insurance program.
DHS announced the numbers the day after the state launched the insurance exchange, an online marketplace where consumers can compare policies and purchase insurance. About half of the 500,000 people expected to participate in the exchange are doing so under the private option.
The state Insurance Department said it didn't have figures yet on the number of Arkansans who have so far enrolled in the exchange. High demand on the federal website has prevented some Arkansans from applying online. Applying by mail and phone are also options.
A spokeswoman for the Insurance Department said more than 22,000 people visited the state's exchange website Tuesday, and 13,700 of those visitors went on to the federal site.
(Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, rewritten, broadcast or distributed.)


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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:09:27 — 143.3MB) | Embed
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This month on Open Apple, we sit down with Mark Kriegsman, author of Star Blaster, and a modern Apple II hacker. He has ported the awesome FastLED driver library to the Apple II, so you can drive many hundreds of 32-bit RGB LEDs with your Apple II.
Meanwhile, we browbeat people into attending KansasFest, we rationalize our shame at developing on emulators, we talk dead tree easter eggs, we make terrible awesome BASIC & Twitter puns, we talk about post-mortem collecting, and Mike generates hate mail. Just in case you're not completely over movies about Steve Jobs, we talk about one of those as well. Yawn.
More importantly, help us convince Mark to build a lo-res display from FastLEDs and bring it to KansasFest.
Once again, in case you missed it, the dates for KansasFest 2015 have been announced. July 14-19! Go to http://www.kansasfest.org to register. Then pull up a comfy chair and enjoy this super-sized episode of Open Apple. Apologies for some audio quality issues in this month. Quinn had some equipment difficulties and Mike has been under the weather. Thanks for your patience. Stay tuned until the end of the show for a special treat (not just Mike's usual cheeky outtake)!
More information on everything discussed in this episode after the jump.
Continue reading "Open Apple #45 (March 2015): Mark Kriegsman, FastLED, Transwarp GS Clone, and Newsapalooza"


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dvd-slideshow is a group of Linux commandline programs that creates a
slideshow-style dvd from groups of pictures. Slideshow videos can be
made from a directory or some online photo albums. You can add fancy
effects like fades, titles, and the Ken Burns effect along with audio
to make your slideshows even nicer.
This requires: oggvideotools, ffmpeg, dvdauthor
Maintained by: Giovanne Castro
Keywords: dvd-slideshow,slideshow,slide-show,dvdauthor,dvd
ChangeLog: dvd-slideshow
Download SlackBuild:
dvd-slideshow.tar.gz.asc (FAQ)
(the SlackBuild does not include the source)
Individual Files: |
dvd-slideshow.SlackBuild |
dvd-slideshow.info |
slack-desc |
© 2006-2024 SlackBuilds.org Project. All rights reserved.
Slackware® is a registered trademark of
Patrick Volkerding
Linux® is a registered trademark of
Linus Torvalds


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Originally announced just for the Wii, Nintendo 3DS and NDS, Activision recently confirmed that an HD enhanced Wii U version of Transformers Prime The Game was also in development.
As for enhancements, the Wii U version of Transformers Prime will run in 1080p resolution and feature tilt and touch-screen functionality using the Wii U GamePad. Take a look at the new screens and a bit more information below.
Transformers Prime Wii U – Rivalries trailer:
[youtube_sc url="wqx9imyjwQ8″ width="550″]
Transformers Prime Wii U screens:
Based on the smash hit, award-winning animated television show produced by Hasbro Studios on The Hub Network, TRANSFORMERS PRIME lets fans play as their favorite AUTOBOT characters and embark on an action-packed adventure to save the earth from the evil MEGATRON and his new secret weapon. In the single player campaign, players will step into the roles of OPTIMUS PRIME, BUMBLEBEE, ARCEE, AUTOBOT RATCHET and BULKHEAD as they explore unique vistas all around the world with brawler-style combat and diverse driving sequences. Along the way, gamers cultivate friendships with Jack, Miko and Raf – the human characters from the show – as TEAM PRIME sets out to protect mankind and eliminate the DECEPTICONS once and for all. The game also features intense multiplayer modes that allow fans to choose from 11 different TRANSFORMERS characters from both factions.
- Interact with TRANSFORMERS characters like never before – Designed for the unique interactivity of the Wii U?, the game allows fans to tilt their gamepad to steer BUMBLEBEE through a collapsing canyon, upgrade OPTIMUS PRIME's combat abilities through their gamepad touchscreens, and more.
- Epic TRANSFORMERS Gameplay in HD – The game utilizes the power of the Wii U, featuring dazzling visuals in 1080p resolution with authentic character models straight from Polygon Pictures, Inc., the Japanese CG animation studio for the TV show.
- Jump Straight into the Action – With the humanity on the brink of survival, players will fight through heroic battles in a huge variety of 3rd person action brawling, shooting, driving and melee combat, all the while wielding the power to change form and power up each AUTOBOT with unique weapons and special abilities.
- Play as Iconic and Fan-Favorite Characters – Fans will get to play as all their favorite characters from the show including OPTIMUS PRIME, BUMBLEBEE, ARCEE and more to defeat MEGATRON, STARSCREAM, THUNDERWING and the DECEPTICON army.
- Explore a Brand New Storyline to Continue the Saga – The game centers around an epic campaign with original story set directly within the TRANSFORMERS PRIME universe, allowing players to forge close relationships with the humans Jack, Miko and Raf and embark on a journey to exotic locales such as Greece, South America and even outer space.
- Challenge Your Friends and Test Your TRANSFORMERS skills – Players can choose from 11 different playable characters from both the AUTOBOTS and DECEPTICONS factions to compete with or against their friends in adrenaline-pumping modes such as Brawl, Battle for Energon and Emblem Match.


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Springtime offers excellent viewing opportunities; scope, bird ID book suggested
Mudflats get busy when hungry shorebirds migrate through Kansas. These long-distance travelers stop to rest where food is plentiful in marshes and playas. Drenched soil teems with small invertebrates that help fuel shorebird flights to the breeding grounds, and spring rains make conditions perfect for learning about these interesting birds.
Helen Hands is a Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks (KDWP) biologist at Cheyenne Bottoms Wildlife Area -- one of the best shorebird viewing locations in America. An avid birder, Hands enjoys watching shorebirds while helping manage this important wetland. She says mid-spring is the best time to visit.
"Although many kinds of birds migrate through the Bottoms, the area is particularly known for its shorebirds," Hands says. "This large group of species is named for its dependence on habitat along the water's edge. Shorebirds may be large or small, but all have long bills designed for probing food from moist soil. Insect larvae and worms are plentiful here, and resting birds can fill up in a hurry."
Shorebirds aren't skittish, but close-up views often require binoculars or spotting scopes. These optics can show impressive details of how the busy feeders hunt and preen. Some birds sift through water to capture swimming prey, while others probe mud for worms and larvae. Larger shorebirds may eat minnows or crustaceans.
A good bird book can help identify shorebird species. Many of the smaller sandpipers are tricky to tell apart although they are easier to identify in spring breeding plumage than the drab color phases of fall migration. The largest shorebirds are often colorful.
Some, such as the snowy plover, are rarely seen. Others, such as semi-palmated sandpipers, are more common. Dowitchers probe worms 4 to 5 inches deep in wet soil. Marbled godwits, black-necked stilts, and American avocets have long legs and often wade in shallow water to feed. White-faced ibises use their long, heavy bills to eat larger meals. Willets are particularly fond of crawdads although they must be careful of these crustacean's strong pinchers.
Shorebird migration is part of nature's grand ballet each spring, and birders visit Cheyenne Bottoms from across the nation to enjoy the show. To view an informative online video on Kansas shorebirds, click on KDWP TV.


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Chepstow Town 3 Haverfordwest County 4
CHEPSTOW Town's Welsh Cup run came to an end when they were narrowly beaten 3-4 at home against 1st Division side Haverfordwest County.
The game was in doubt up to an hour before kick off but following a tremendous two day snow clearance effort by club volunteers the referee declared that the match could go ahead.
The heavy pitch made it difficult for both teams to play their normal passing game but despite this the match was full of incident from the first whistle.
Chepstow went into the match full of confidence and were not in awe of their more experienced opponents. However Haverfordwest soon showed why they are near the top of the First Division and began to take control of the game with their defenders making sure that Chepstow did not cause any problems for goalkeeper, Peter Blaim.
After 15 minutes Haverfordwest took the lead when central striker Ben Steel took advantage of some loose defending to put the ball past home keeper, Callum George.
Within 5 minutes Chepstow found themselves 2 goals behind when central defender Tony Shier deflected a wicked cross from the right into his own net.
Despite these setbacks Chepstow began to get into the game and created enough chances to reduce the deficit before half time. However the Haverfordwest defence stood firm and the away side took their 2 nil lead into half time.
Manager Russell Griffiths's half time talk seemed to do the trick as Chepstow put their opponents under pressure right from the kick off and were unlucky not to score on several occasions.
Chepstow then suffered a further setback when Haverfordwest were awarded a free kick on the edge of the penalty area and substitute Anton Owens placed the ball wide of keeper Callum George to give the away side a 3 nil lead.
Within a minute however Chepstow reduced the lead when striker Jason Thorne evaded several tackles to score an excellent goal. The match was now turning into a real cup tie with Chepstow doing everything they could to score a second goal.
This opportunity came when Jason Thorn was fouled in the penalty area but unfortunately the same player failed to score when he put the penalty wide of the post.
At this point Haverfordwest were struggling to contain Chepstow but the home side received a further setback in the 75th minute when central defender Andrew Wenzel received a straight red card for a tackle on his opponent. The referee's decision seemed unjust but seemed to spur Chepstow to even greater effort.
Within a minute of the sending off Haverfordwest's lead was further reduced when they also conceded an own goal when midfielder Chris O'Sullivan put the ball past his own keeper.
Five minutes later Haverfordwest went back into a 2 goal lead when a rare attack gave Stefan Williams the opportunity to take advantage of a defensive slip and score his side's 4th goal.
There were now goalmouth incidents at both ends and Haverfordwest also showed how nervous they were when they also missed a penalty. Both sides were now looking very tired due to the heavy pitch but there was still further excitement to come when Chepstow captain Mark Dunn had the final touch of the ball when a shot from Jason Thorn hit the post and the ball stuck in the mud on the goal line.
With 5 minutes to go and the score at 3-4 Chepstow bombarded the Haverfordwest goal and there was even one more incident when the Haverfordwest coach was sent off for impeding Ashley Palmer as he was about to take a throw in.
Try as they might Chepstow could not score that all important equalising goal to take the game into extra time and the final score remained at 4-3 in favour of Haverfordwest.
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text:
Buy Links:
Length: 68,000 words approx.
Cover Design: Reverie Formatting and Design
Cayuga Cougars Series
Sander March is one season away from the pros, or so everyone tells him.
If only Sander had as much faith in his ability as the Cougar coaching staff does. Outwardly, he's cocksure, borderline bitter, and slightly sarcastic. All that strut and sass hides a wounded soul though. Working to hide a brutal past filled with humiliation, abuse, and a family member who still haunts him, Sander has never found the kind of comfort and understanding he so desperately needs. Until he meets Mateo Castillo, a minor league baseball player for the nearby Elmira Egrets. Mateo and Sander click instantly, and a budding friendship develops between the two athletes.
Mateo then introduces Sander to his boyfriend, Noah Coombs, an aspiring manga comic creator. The three men find themselves bonding strongly, and that slowly gives way to sexual attraction. Eventually, Mateo and Noah invite Sander into their relationship. The path to happiness isn't going to be easy for Sander as he faces criticism from his friends, teammates, and the press for his choices. The brash young star can handle all that, it's when his abuser shows up in Cayuga that Sander fears not only for his own safety, but for the lives of the two men he has grown to love. Will Sander's past tear him away from Mateo and Noah, or will he be able to leave the darkness behind?
Warning - This story has disturbing subject matter.
V.L. Locey loves worn jeans, yoga, belly laughs, Dr. Who, Torchwood, walking, reading and writing lusty tales, Greek mythology, the New York Rangers, comic books, and coffee. (Not necessarily in that order.) She shares her life with her husband, her daughter, one dog, two cats, two Jersey steers and a flock of assorted domestic fowl.
When not writing lusty tales, she can be found enjoying her day with her menagerie in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania with a cup of fresh java in hand.
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Silverado 1500
- Sale Price $56,246
- Marthaler Savings $5,954
See Important Disclosures Here
Price includes all GM rebates in combination with Marthaler Discount: $1750 - Bonus Cash. Exp. 03/04/2024 $750 - Customer Cash. Exp. 03/04/2024
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Easy quick process. Jessie was prompt, knowledgeable and courteous. Love the buy from home and delivery.
Christian was great to deal with from the start. When he couldn't meet with me he made sure there was 2 great guys there to help me. Bryce & Chad were...
Awesome customer service. I appreciate the help at the front desk, the finance manager and especially from salesperson - ShawnR for all the help in th...
Everyone is friendly and helpful Jesse did a good job.